Bram.us » PHP Willow Tree http://www.bram.us A rather geeky/technical weblog by Bram(us) Van Damme Sat, 04 Feb 2012 11:59:08 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 My inc.functions.php – Part 4 : Unshifting elements on an array and preserving keys http://www.bram.us/2007/11/19/my-incfunctionsphp-part-4-unshifting-elements-on-an-array-and-preserving-keys/ http://www.bram.us/2007/11/19/my-incfunctionsphp-part-4-unshifting-elements-on-an-array-and-preserving-keys/#comments Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:42:16 +0000 Bramus! http://www.bram.us/2007/11/19/my-incfunctionsphp-part-4-unshifting-elements-on-an-array-and-preserving-keys/ Continue reading →]]> PHP Willow TreeThe fourth part of this series of handy little PHP functions only contains a little tip when one needs to add an element to the beginning of an array (viz. prepend, unshift) but has to preserve the (numerical) keys.

Prerequisites

Imagine you have an array of zipcodes as keys and names of cities as values:

$zipcodes = array(
	'9800' => 'Deinze',
	'8460' => 'Ettelgem',
	'9000' => 'Gent',
	'8400' => 'Oostende'
);

Now, if I were to place those into a dropdown, I’d run that array to a function like so:

function createDropdown($ddName, $arValues) {
	$toReturn = "<select name=\"$ddName\" id=\"$ddName\">\n";
	foreach ($arValues as $key => $value) {
		$toReturn .= "\t<option value=\"$key\">$value</option>\n";
	}
	$toReturn .= "</select>";
	return $toReturn;
}

Running the array above through that function would result in the following HTML:

<!-- output of echo createDropdown("test", $zipcodes); -->
<select name="test" id="test">
	<option value="9800">Deinze</option>
	<option value="8460">Ettelgem</option>
	<option value="9000">Gent</option>
	<option value="8400">Oostende</option>
</select>

Quite obvious, not?

The problem

Now, I don’t want to have “Deinze” show up in the dropdown as the first item, but I want to show “Please choose your city” as the first item (with a value of 0). A quick peek at the PHP docs tell me that I need to use array_unshift to “prepend one or more elements to the beginning of an array”

array_unshift($zipcodes, "Please Choose a City");

Running the code above would float my boat, right? Wrong! The note at the phpdocs that “All numerical array keys will be modified to start counting from zero while literal keys won’t be touched”. After having run array_unshift on $zipcodes it indeed looks like this:

Array
(
    [0] => Please Choose a City
    [1] => Deinze
    [2] => Ettelgem
    [3] => Gent
    [4] => Oostende
)

The solution

The solution is to create a second array with only one item (index: “0”, value: “Please choose a city” and then merge them together, but not using the array_merge function as the function looses numerical keys too!

So what does one need to use then? Well, it might sound noobcake-ish to you but this one I didn’t know: one can actually join 2 arrays in PHP by using the mathematical + operator! Now this is something I did not expect (it looks so not-PHP-alike, not?)!

$zipcodes = array("0" => "Please Choose a City") + $zipcodes;

And yes, the array now looks like:

Array
(
    [0] => Please Choose a City
    [9800] => Deinze
    [8460] => Ettelgem
    [9000] => Gent
    [8400] => Oostende
)

And the HTML output after running the array through the createDropdown function looks like:

<select name="test" id="test">
	<option value="0">Please Choose a City</option>
	<option value="9800">Deinze</option>
	<option value="8460">Ettelgem</option>
	<option value="9000">Gent</option>
	<option value="8400">Oostende</option>
</select>

Wrapping up

To finalize, one could wrap this little trick into a function and presto, but since it would take more code to join 2 arrays through a custom built function (which only uses a + operator) it’s way more easy to “just” remember this little trick ;)

]]> http://www.bram.us/2007/11/19/my-incfunctionsphp-part-4-unshifting-elements-on-an-array-and-preserving-keys/feed/ 1 My inc.functions.php – Part 3 : Nicer Summaries with reworkSummary() http://www.bram.us/2007/01/11/my-incfunctionsphp-part-3-nicer-summaries-with-reworksummary/ http://www.bram.us/2007/01/11/my-incfunctionsphp-part-3-nicer-summaries-with-reworksummary/#comments Thu, 11 Jan 2007 20:28:43 +0000 Bramus! http://www.bram.us/2007/01/11/my-incfunctionsphp-part-3-nicer-summaries-with-reworksummary/ Continue reading →]]> PHP Willow TreeIn the third part of this series of handy little PHP functions I’ll be describing a darn little function that only has an impact on the aesthetics of a site.

Of summaries and such

Imagine you have a site that has a sidebar containing auto-generated summaries of (news)items, as seen on Jonathan Snook’s blog for example

Jonathan Snook's Blog

(I could have referred to some other sites, yet Jonathan’s blog is perfect to highlight the why of this function)

If you take a closer look at the summaries you’ll see that they all are cut at about the 200th character:

I had a few things I wanted to mention and separate posts about each didn’t seem warranted so here it is: 3 days left! The SXSW 2007 Interactive Pass Contest was off to a strong start with a bunch …

Above that the summary is a flat version of the actual post: in the full news/blogpost of the item quoted above you’ll see that 3 days left! is a heading for example.

Freebie: creating the summary

Before getting to reworkSummary(), a function to create a summary is needed. This is actually plain simple:

  • Enforce the string to be HTML (thus the opposite of htmlentities())
  • Strip out the HTML (that’s why the string had to be enforced to be HTML)
  • Cut at the 200th character

The order of these steps are important, since otherwise one would be able to cut right in between an xhtml tag…

The PHP code for this is even more easy.

// All your code are belong to bram.us
	function makeSummary($text, $length, $hellip = "&hellip;") {
		// enforce html text (maybe it was encoded somewhere)
		$htmlText	= html_entity_decode($text);
		// strip out the tags
		$flatText	= strip_tags($htmlText);
		// text is not longer than length, return flatText
		if (strlen($flatText) <= $length) {
			return $flatText;
		// text is longer than length, create the summary and add hellips
		} else {
			$summary	= substr($flatText, 0, $length);
			return $summary.$hellip;
		}
	}

With the addition of the horizontal ellipsis at the end (to indicate that there’s more to read) we’re done, right?

And now … the carbomb (Dr. Dre)

Wrong! In the example quote way at the top, you’ll see that the summary was cut just after a word, yet some other summaries are cut right in the middle or a word, for example:

This seems to bite me in the ass more often than not but any time you add a new model or adjust your associations, be sure to delete the cached ones from the /app/tmp/ folder. I’ll get inexplicable er…

Not that nice indeed.

Now I must say that I myself hadn’t noticed this, it was only until a client of ours made me aware of it whilst developing their site that I saw it. And boy I must say, she sure was right: it does look pretty nasty when a word is cut in half and the horizontal ellipsis is placed right after that. *Yoink*

MEDIA Desk Nederland

Solution for this problem actually is "as easy as killing babies with axes": just cut off the summary on the last space and you’re done (there would a problem if no space occurs, yet that won’t occur on a regular news-/blogpost). So next to the makeSummary() function we’ll create a reworkSummary() function to take the appropriate actions.

The resulting PHP code for this is:

// All your code are belong to bram.us
	function reworkSummary($summary) {
		// find last space
		$pos = strrpos($summary, " ");
		// a space was found: return substring from 0 till found position
		if ($pos !== false) {
			return substr($summary, 0, $pos);
		// no space was found: return the created summary
		} else {
			return $summary;
		}
	}

Now all you have to do is adjust makeSummary() so that it calls the reworkSummary() function. Please note that the default horizontal ellipsis now is preceded with a space, to make it look even nicer:

// All your code are belong to bram.us
	function makeSummary($text, $length, $hellip = " &hellip;") {
		// enforce html text (maybe it was encoded somewhere)
		$htmlText	= html_entity_decode($text);
		// strip out the tags
		$flatText	= strip_tags($htmlText);
		// text is not longer than length, return flatText
		if (strlen($flatText) <= $length) {
			return $flatText;
		// text is longer than length, create the summary and add hellips
		} else {
			$summary	= substr($flatText, 0, $length);
			return reworkSummary($summary).$hellip;
		}
	}

Code example:

The following code …

echo makeSummary("Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.", 200);
echo makeSummary("Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.", 200, " (continued)");
echo makeSummary("Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.", 200, " (continued)");

… will output:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type &hellip;
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type (continued)
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.

Happy summarizing!

B!

]]> http://www.bram.us/2007/01/11/my-incfunctionsphp-part-3-nicer-summaries-with-reworksummary/feed/ 8 My inc.functions.php – Part 2 : Creating a post slug http://www.bram.us/2006/12/18/my-incfunctionsphp-part-2-creating-a-post-slug/ http://www.bram.us/2006/12/18/my-incfunctionsphp-part-2-creating-a-post-slug/#comments Mon, 18 Dec 2006 22:25:02 +0000 Bramus! http://www.bram.us/2006/12/18/my-incfunctionsphp-part-2-creating-a-post-slug/ Continue reading →]]> PHP Willow TreeIn the second part of this series (Click for part 1) another tiny, yet handy PHP function is described. Some of you might already have discovered the power of having a "post slug" in an URI. Not only does a post slug give an indication to the user (he can tell by the URI what the post/link is all about), it also improves your ranking within search engines as they mark a word in the URI as being important and relevant.

Basically a post slug only contains the alphanumerical characters and spaces get replaced by dashes. Above that it’s lowercase.

These 3 criteria can easily be achieved by using a regular expression to filter out the alphanumerical characters, followed by a simple str_replace to replace all spaces by dashes and finally followed by a lowercase() call.

// Bramus! pwnge! : simple method to create a post slug (http://www.bram.us/)
	function fixForUri($string) {
		$slug = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9 -]/", "", $string); // only take alphanumerical characters, but keep the spaces and dashes too...
		$slug = str_replace(" ", "-", $slug); // replace spaces by dashes
		$slug = strtolower($slug);	// make it lowercase
		return $slug;
	}

The function itself can of course be written into a single line, yet to make it all more readable it has been spread out. One call per line.

The reason I’ve named the function fixForUri() is due to the fact that the function actually fixes any given string for usage in an URI

Happy coding!

B!

Oh yeah, the next function coming up in this series will be a pure aesthetic one …

]]> http://www.bram.us/2006/12/18/my-incfunctionsphp-part-2-creating-a-post-slug/feed/ 3 My inc.functions.php – Part 1 : Fixing those gmail.com e-mail addresses. http://www.bram.us/2006/11/30/my-incfunctionsphp-part-1-fixing-those-gmailcom-e-mail-addresses/ http://www.bram.us/2006/11/30/my-incfunctionsphp-part-1-fixing-those-gmailcom-e-mail-addresses/#comments Thu, 30 Nov 2006 20:04:42 +0000 Bramus! http://www.bram.us/2006/11/30/my-incfunctionsphp-part-1-fixing-those-gmailcom-e-mail-addresses/ Continue reading →]]> PHP Willow TreeAfter seeing Shaun’s Fixing the $_FILES superglobal I found myself browsing around in the inc.functions.php file I’ve been using and maintaining project by project. To my own surprise I noticed that the file itself has grown over time and kind of is stuffed with some darn handy functions! Time to spread them out, starting with this one right here: fixGmail();

Whilst coding Iedereenleeftmee back in May fixGmail() was created to rework gmail.com addresses. Reason for reworking all those addresses was the fact that Iedereenleeftmee was/is based upon unique e-mail addresses. But what is there to rework on an e-mail address? And why only GMail?

As one might know, gmail accounts are in and have some bugs the Google team would like to call features:

  • Period Stuffing
  • Plussing

Period Stuffing

Period Stuffing – as I like to call it – implies that periods can be added anywhere in the username without affecting it at all

For example think of me having bram@gmail.com (which I don’t!). The first "feature" implies that all of the following e-mail addresses will arrive to bram@gmail.com:

  • b.ram@gmail.com
  • br.am@gmail.com
  • bra.m@gmail.com
  • b.r.am@gmail.com
  • …
  • Heck, even "b……ram@gmail.com" would arrive!

As you can see this was an issue with Iedereenleeftmee since some handy dudes would just invite themselves 9 times (with each having a period on a different spot), thus receiving 10 free entrance tickets to an amusement park of choice.

Plussing

Plussing can be taken quite literally: use a plus sign (+) to add an extra parameter/piece of text to to your e-mail address

Take that bram@gmail.com account again … what if I had to subscribe to some forum leaving behind my e-mail address. How would I ever possibly know if they sold/gave my e-mailaddy to someone else? This is where PA kicks in: one can actually enter bram+thatgamesforum@gmail.com and the mails would still arriving! Quite handy imo (so you can really track who’s selling what and/or even filter some stuff), yet not handy for the webdeveloper who wants users to be unique by their e-mailaddress…

The PHP Code

The PHP Code is quite simple and laid upon thee here for grabbing:

// Bramus! pwnge! : fixes gmail.com mail addresses (http://www.bram.us/)
function fixGmail($emailaddy) {
	// $emailaddy is an '@gmail.com'-address
	if (eregi('@gmail.com', $emailaddy)) {
		// make lowercase, strip out periods (but fix gmailcom)
		$emailaddy	= str_replace("@gmailcom","@gmail.com",str_replace(".", "", strtolower($emailaddy)));
		// a plus sign is found in $emailaddy
		if (eregi('\+', $emailaddy)) {
			// grab the substring from the start up to the first plus sign and add @gmail.com
			$emailaddy	= substr($emailaddy,0, strpos($emailaddy,"+"))."@gmail.com";
		}
	}
	// now return it
	return $emailaddy;
}

Successfully tested with a series of e-mail addresses, all resulting bram@gmail.com

  • bram@gmail.com
  • b.r.am@gmail.com
  • b.r…..am@gmail.com
  • bram+newsgroups@gmail.com
  • bram+forum@gmail.com
  • b.ram+extra@gmail.com
  • b.r.am+extra@gmail.com
  • b.ram+ex..tra@gmail.com
  • b.r.am+ex+t.ra@gmail.com

That’s it for now…

Stay tuned for more PHP Geekery!

B!

(post scriptum: Icon companioning this post is a Willow Tree, influenced by Fat Freddy’s Drop!)

]]> http://www.bram.us/2006/11/30/my-incfunctionsphp-part-1-fixing-those-gmailcom-e-mail-addresses/feed/ 3